People like you have only given the Republicans both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the likely ability to appoint an strongly conservative (probably reactionary) SCOTUS that will greatly influence this country for decades to come.
How many Cruz-supporters / Republicans do you know who refer to conservatives as "reactionaries"?
This misunderstanding here is important and illustrative. Your attempt to pigeonhole me and launch into autopilot lecture-me-about-teh-evil-right-wing is the problem right there. That shit did not and is not going to work on actual Trump voters going forward. I know it feels really important and energizing to you, and maybe it does serve a useful political purpose in energizing the base of the party, but among independents and fence-sitters it makes you look weak and unable to engage in the issues that really matter.
Your argument is like that of a petulant child when called out: "s/he made me do it". It's funny how Republican supporters, who talk about personal responsibility now want to deflect responsibility for Trump's election on someone else.
Work on your reading comprehension. I'm not a Trump supporter (and in the post you replied to I clearly said "I don't think people made the right decision this year.") I am an anti-Trump leftist who was arguing on this very site, weeks before the election, that the anti-Trump rhetoric was backfiring disastrously.
For the rest, I can only refer you to my other reply. I know multiple female Obama supporters who voted for Trump. If you think it's more important that you bleat about the KKK and pussy grabbing twenty times a day for the next four years, so be it. Hopefully, others may realize that most people in this country are more concerned about actual policies. (And yes, Trump had some atrocious ones that were completely drowned out by the tsunami of tedious non-sequitur bullshit regarding just how big a racist and sexist he is.)
As for character, what about all the times Trump used the words: "lying Hillary". Was that not a character assassination?
Things that work very well for the right often don't work for the left. It's not fair. Life isn't fair. I'm beyond fairness; I'm trying to get people to care about what can actually work so that the left in this country can be fixed.
You attempt to explain away the misogyny as just talk. Did you miss the women who came forward to accuse him of actual assault?
Did you miss the part where I said that maybe not every presidential election comes down to a referendum on character? My mother and my sister both voted Trump. They previously voted for Obama. Twice. I can assure you, they don't have an ounce of "internalized misogyny" in their bones. My mother got a flier in the mail (she lives in a swing state) that was primarily bemoaning the fact that Trump once called Rosie O'Donnell a fat pig. She laughed, tossed it in the garbage.
And why shouldn't she? I don't agree with her vote for Trump, not at all, but she and my sister correctly perceived that there wasn't any misogynistic legislation being proposed beyond the abortion stuff which, while rather troubling, wasn't at the tops of their priority lists. This is a simple heuristic method of eliminating the stuff, no matter how dumb or odious it is, that isn't likely to matter in terms of policies Trump officially promotes.
The man could stop kittens to death in his spare time... oh well. If it's a crime, arrest him. If not, we've got much bigger things to worry about. Millions of people have come around to this way of thinking. It wasn't a sudden thing, either. Pretty sure it started in the late 90s with Bill and Monica.
So you admit that Trump made xenophobia a policy position. Basically, you are in denial.
No. Again, this is a heuristic approach. "Ok, he's calling for something that could literally never, ever happen in this country" ==> "ok, so what are they *actually* going to do once someone calms him down and tries to explain the constitution to him?"
Trump isn't half as clever as a lot of people around here seem to think he is, but he managed to at least accidentally stumble into a strategy where the left was provoked into frantically arguing about non-issues. Trump's illegal proposals were non-issues, except to the extent that it proved he was a asshole and a moron, but evidence on those counts was not lacking. Trump's misogyny, such as it was, was even less of an issue for anyone who had already called the personality contest a wash.
He also said it was fine to sexually assault women if you're famous.
Except no, he didn't. He said that women will "let you" kiss them / touch them when you're famous. He was bragging (probably lying), in a cringingly over the top manner, about women being attracted to him "like a magnet" , and yet at least a third of this country refuses to concede this extremely obvious point. Mainstream news outlets like the New York Times are still repeating this astounding fabrication of what he actually said on that tape, and prolific posters here on slashdot will apparently simply add me to their foe list instead of engaging in an intellectually honest discussion of what he was actually saying on the tape.
attacked women for being women
For every "blood coming out of her whatever" (which wasn't even directed at Hillary, was it?), Trump had at least five hundred criticisms that had nothing to do with gender. If you want to argue Trump is a douche you'll get little argument out of me, but I was debating people on slashdot before the election who literally thought that calling Hillary "crooked" was misogynistic. To say it was making a mountain out of a molehill would be a massive understatement. The whinging never stopped. We couldn't ever move *beyond* the misogyny criticism and into actual policy debate. I mean hell, there was even a sustained campaign to paint Bernie supporters as misogynistic, and multiple mainstream media sources (as well as The Onion, tragically) are still clinging to this head-shakingly moronic "glass ceiling still intact!" narrative.
You'd probably not have as many upsets if you looked at the actual arguments and not some superficial appraisal.
Look in the mirror. This election didn't reveal a massive hidden racist element in America. It revealed that the mainstream left is completely incapable of moving beyond the superficial or indeed glancing outside of their safe space echo chamber. I say this as a leftist myself, and someone who was trying in vain to point out to people that the anti-Trump argument was going sideways months ago.
Along with 53% of other white women, my mother and (as I just found out yesterday) my sister voted for Trump. And previously they both voted for Obama. Twice. If the majority of the left writes this off to "internalized misogyny" and changes absolutely nothing about the rhetoric, the midterms will change nothing and Trump will be re-elected in 2020.
Or maybe the job of president isn't always a referendum on character? I don't think people made the right choice this year, but it's obvious that it was people like you who drove many fence-sitters to the wrong decision... you refused to discuss the actual issues.
"Racism" was not a policy debate in this election. Immigration was.
"Misogyny" wasn't a policy position in this election. Anti-misogyny really wasn't either except among an especially cringy segment of the population (including Clinton and Sanders, sadly) who believe the $0.79 on the dollar "pay gap" can be solved through legislation. (The gap is mostly due to women choosing lower-paying jobs and working fewer hours, which you could argue is a cultural thing we need to change but it's not something you can just legislate away.) There was no proposal to legalize non-consensual pussy-grabbing... or did I miss that Trump speech?
"Xenophobia" wasn't a policy position in this election. Legal and illegal immigration from specific countries were the issues. (Putting aside some shit-talking from Trump about a religious test for entry--which is so obviously unlawful that even a conservative SCOTUS would probably strike it down unanimously.)
But please, do keep up the shaming. People like you have only given the Republicans both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the likely ability to appoint an strongly conservative (probably reactionary) SCOTUS that will greatly influence this country for decades to come. I'm sure that if you can simply call Trump Hilter a hundred times a day, everyone is bound to come to their senses by 2020.
The problem is that people like you wildly conflate policy with sound bites / character assessment. I think the American public got sick of the character assassination stuff in the late 90s. Who the hell cares if he's racist? (I happen to think it's more a matter of him blathering mindlessly, but he could be racist too, sure.) What matters are his policies.
Without agreeing with most of Trump's nonsense on these points, there are obviously rational, non-racist reasons for opposing additional illegal immigration and for restricting legal immigration or extended visas from certain countries (of course not all Muslim-majority countries.)
There isn't any country in the world that allows completely unfettered immigration (Svalbard possibly being the closest to an actual open door policy among developed nations, but almost no one takes advantage of this loophole due to the latitude.) Per-country restrictions, particularly for security reasons, have been around forever. If ten thousand Germans civilians, all claiming to be refugees fleeing from Hitler, tried to enter America in 1943... I don't really think we would've let them in, even if the majority were obviously genuine refugees.
There are arguments on the other side of these debates, some of which I'm rather sympathetic to, but your side chose to ignore this in lieu of "OMFG RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST!" Well, sorry, "racism" wasn't an actual, specific policy issue in this election. Immigration was. And people like you largely chose to not debate this issue. For every one genuine and compelling argument from the pro-Hillary side, we saw ten virtue signaling non-sequiturs and this turned a lot of people off.
Even if you know that, it is far from obvious that there will be a hardware and software interface that'll let you turn an apparent read-only/write-only device into a read/write device.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that few hardware manufacturers have bothered to create a design where electrical signals can be sent to a speaker/headphone jack, but never received. That sounds like the sort of thing that would require more money to build.
The software interface could/would be provided by the attacker, of course.
I've never heard of any malware doing it before, so I'd say this is pretty clever.
Meh. It's not a new idea at all. I had an electronics kit in the 6th grade that came with a little earpiece that functioned as both a speaker and a microphone. There obviously was only a single diaphragm, and when I read up on how speakers and microphones worked it was readily apparent that they were the same thing (but usually with optimizations for one functionality or the other.)
And so years later when I heard about security concern over webcams, I instantly thought of the speakers as well. There's been talk about this possibility for a long time but there's been nearly as much concern as there has been vs. webcams. Probably because it's tricky, and of limited utility to regular attackers.
One more thing to note though: acoustic analysis can sometimes decode keystrokes on a keyboard fairly accurately. This means that one compromised speaker in a room (perhaps in an IoT device) could be used to compromise the password for a non-compromised device.
I never said I was surprised by the flip flopping. I said it was *unpredictable*. That is, the flip flopping (in general) is predictable, but the specifics have not been. To a large extent he's been doubling down on the shit that has strong boomerang effects when he has no reason to.
It's becoming clear that it's less shrewd and less deliberate than many people (myself included) originally estimated. My opinion of his apparent guile in these matters plummeted after the primary was over. He's not completely clueless, there's a slight method to *some* of the madness but there's no damn reason for him to be doing this on multiple issues at this moment in time. I suppose one could argue he's trying to saturate the media to draw attention away from his cabinet picks or something, but I think that's grasping at straws.
I don't know what to think nor even if it's worth thinking about any more. Governance by RNG. Ignoring for a moment all those shadowy Republican puppet-masters that are a hell of a lot cleverer and more tenacious than Trump... this could actually be an improvement of sorts?
I mean, this is not actually flip-flopping any more. The term is simply not strong enough. What we have here is a flesh and blood expert system running some crude, buggy-as-shit genetic optimizing algorithm... and it's shortly going to be POTUS.
Or it could establish an "Eminent Public Domain" program that allows free use of a work of authorship while compensating its author, by estimating a copyright's fair market value and letting the people crowdfund a "taking" pursuant to the Fifth Amendment.
I've always been a fan of this idea, particularly for patents. We're at this big plateau in the first silicon revolution now, just waiting for enough patents to expire and enough factories to be built for the second revolution to kick off.. you know, the one where VERY POWERFUL computers can be had for perhaps $5 (plus the cost of power supply/LCD/etc. if needed), and we see a new boom of incredible CPU-heavy technologies built on the back of this new solution-in-search-of-a-problem. (The AI boom alone should be phenomenal.)
It'll probably take us at least another 15-30 years to reach it on our own (Raspberry Pi is but the tiniest shadow of things to come), but with eminent domain vs. patents plus a few savvy investors willing to build the factories, it could probably happen in just a few years.
Combined with the "I didn't wait bit", and with his apology clearly stating his actions didn't match his words, yes.
Didn't wait for what? A "hello" ? Eye contact? How *precisely* do you imagine this implied scenario going down, this one that he was bragging about and then apologizing to the Republican base about?
I just want to you fully articulate this ridiculous, raging fantasy you obviously have going on up there... this assumption that to "not wait" can only refer to not wait *for any sort of consent or reciprocal speech/action whatsoever* and that his words can only reasonably be parsed to describe an assault. Please, annotate the whole thing if you want. Give us a blow by blow of the subtext, as it appears in your mind.
The apology is irrelevant. Trump has never apologized to or courted SJWs in his life. He was obviously worried about the Mormons and the rest of the evangelicals who genuinely do get into hissy fits when sex is even brought up at all (notice how things went in Utah?), let alone highly crude talk of extramarital sex.
Let me reiterate for the one or two people who may have followed this thread: I very clearly tied this back to your original claim that the "grabbing by the pussy" line was a description of a sexual assault, a claim you doubled and tripled down on.
And now you're running away, because *you* can't stay on topic (the topic being that tape and that sentence and the surrounding context) or answer a very simple question like "what do you think Trump meant?" which (counting this) I've now asked you three times. And your parting shot is to claim that I'm the one engaging in rhetorical tricks and off-topic incoherences.
You keep repeating the same crap. There's more to sexual assault than having to noisily fight off an attacker.
And an assault is not implied in that tape, in any way shape and form. I'll keep repeating this (well, for one or two more replies, anyway), so long as you keep repeating your fabrications.
Apart from that bit about *not* *waiting* followed by Trump's own apologies stating his actions were NOT the same as his words.
1. Guilt by apology? That damns a lot of people right there, including a lot of rape victims. 2. He was still trying very hard to not lose the evangelical vote. There's no particular reason to suspect he was saying "I didn't really rape anyone" when the Christians were pissed off about the crudeness / fraternization / possible adultery.
And you completely gloss over the fact that "not waiting for any consent whatsoever" is not a reasonable interpretation of those words. Seven years ago, a girl I'd never been with before "didn't wait" to grab my dick. I'm not inclined to brag, but if I were I would probably say something to that effect: "She didn't wait!" If grilled in detail, I might have to clarify: "Ok, she paused for a split second on my inner thigh, at which point I did nothing but indicate my continued interest in the endeavor", thus clarifying that consent was provided, but that doesn't make a terribly good macho bragging story does it? She didn't wait. She grabbed me by the dick. These words do not carry an implication of sexual assault except among some rather hysterical sections of the left who seem largely unaware of the damage their overeagerness is doing to their own cause.
Well this takes the biscuit. You have built up a little fantasy about what you wished he said
He stumbled over a sentence and interrupted himself. You did not answer my question: what do you think he was trying to say? I care about the actual tape and the actual picture he was trying to paint. You appear to care about none of that; you care only about the witch hunt and the broader picture. Well, it turns out the youth of today doesn't really give a shit about your witch hunt mentality. I'm not saying smoking guns don't exist, but they didn't exist HERE.
You are literally making up lies about what I said and then claiming it's my fault.
You very clearly claimed that pussy grabbing is sexual assault. This is absurd. It is not sexual assault any more than "putting a diamond ring in my pocket" (with no further context provided) is grand theft.
There is no way to reason with people so disconnected from reality as you.
My claims have been extremely limited, sensible, and easy to approach if you're being intellectually honest. You're the one insisting that the entire picture be analyzed and judged in one fell swoop and bitching and moaning that I'm interested more in the micro picture of individual lies that led to an entire generation of young people becoming very disillusioned with the whole thing.
This is the other reason the right won.
Numbers show pretty clearly that disillusionment (low turnout), particularly among the youth, was the most decisive factor in this election.
Apart from a weird fantasy about what happened which does not match reality
I am rubber; you are glue? I'm talking about words on a tape and the mis-characterizations of that tape. You're jackknifing all over the damn place.
Yes. You want us to interpret the word "let" as "outwardly let, but they didn't really *willingly let* him because they were under coercion", which in the context of Trump's tape is a whole-cloth fabrication. There was no such implication in the tape.
it = the kissing. It's quite clear. And he said quite clearly he did not wait.
Correct. And then people like you added "for consent [be it implicit/explicit/any]" to that sentence, when there is every implication to the contrary.
This isn't my only point here, far from it, but I am curious: do you honestly believe Trump meant to say "I've always been automatically attracted to beautiful women" (a rather hollow sentence, even by his standards)... or, given the over the top bragging context of the conversation, was he trying to say "beautiful women have always been automatically attracted to me"? And if you admit that he meant to say the latter, I'm very curious about where you think you can sense this implication from Trump that the women weren't into it.
The only reason to not give a toss if if you want to use those positions of power yourself. I mean if you never mention that you're abusing such a position it's a-OK according to you.
Pro tip: it isn't.
Non-sequitur nonsense. I care about leftists lying about the contents of this specific tape as a compelling example of the sort of misfires that led to Trump's election. If there's evidence elsewhere that he abused his power then he abused his power. That doesn't excuse bullshit like this, where you blatantly lie about the contents of a tape. The alt-right feeds and grows on this very thing, this whinging leftist PC masochism that cheapens and weakens terms like "rape", "misogyny" and "racism" whilst actual victims (very possibly even including victims of Trump) slip under the radar.
IOW you can't be bothered to know what's going on so you simply invent shit
I've invented nothing. I've merely responded to the soundbite that people like you are responsible for inventing and pushing, after the man gave you a mountain of legitimate and very powerful ammunition to use against him.
Hm let me see. If some woman came up to me and started kissing me without my consent, yeah, I'd be pretty fucking pissed off.
Trump strongly implied there was consent, whilst giving no implication whatsoever there was a lack of consent.
Doubly so if they did it from a position of power.
Did Trump say anything implying that he was leveraging a position of power?
Don't mix up your sex scandals. I'm talking about the tape and the tape alone, because it was (as I argued weeks before the election) an embarrassingly cringy moment when I realized the left was ignoring the mountain of ammunition they had in favor of lying about what Trump had said, a lie that took me 30 seconds on Google to uncover.
Yeah you are, you're inventing reasons why it's OK.
No, I'm pointing out that you people are, at best, deeply confused about the "it" in that sentence. There's no implication whatsoever that the "it" was a woman being coerced in any way.
So it's misandry to not want to have women physically push themselves on me against my will?
You're doing it again. What appeal does the left have... left if you all resort to this sort of "Saddam had WMDs" level of fabrications? There is no implication whatsoever, in Trump's words, that the women were unwilling. His entire implicit macho thesis was some sort of animal magnetism bullshit.
He was trying to say (although he flubbed the words as usual) that beautiful women have always been attracted to him. You even quoted that bit to me. For fuck's sake, can't you see how sad it is that you want to make people believe he was bragging about raping women, instead of the infinitely more obvious ego-pumping interpretation that he was claiming that women were crazy attracted to him?
Pretty clear then that EVERYONE except apologists knew what those words meant. Those words mean sexual assault.
No, they don't. I can recall girls who have "not waited" to kiss me. It wasn't sexual assault, because there was strong implicit consent given (even if it was subtle) and also I made no attempt to avoid or disengage. Once time, I was "grabbed by the dick" (through my pants) literally less than thirty seconds after flirting began (...by a friend, not a sex worker, just to clarify.) Implied consent was most certainly given. I would characterize this encounter, wait for it... as one wherein the female involved did not wait.
"Not wait"..."they let you do it", among normal people without severe personality or sexual disorders, means to not draw things out with a ton of flirting. It does not mean to walk up to random strangers on the street and start doing things out of the blue with zero words or body language exchanged.
My view of sexuality is that it is not OK to use a position of power to sexually assault people. If you disagree, then frankly it is you who is deeply broken, not me.
I don't give a toss about positions of power, because Trump did not reference his position of power once in that tape. If you want to talk about him supposedly sneaking in and looking at naked women in his beauty pageants then yeah, that's fucked up and possibly a crime, but that's not the topic at hand.
I care about the tolerance and propagation of lies and self-destructive hysteria on the left much more than I care about the analysis of the character of Donald J. Trump. If you're trying to trick me into saying he's an asshole or a moron then let me just save you the trouble: he's an asshole and a moron. I am concerned with the fact that the left is trying to beat the right at their own game and doing irreversible damage in the process.
Except no it isn't. Otherwise why would he have to come out and say that he didn't actually do what he claimed to do?
If you cannot see how the assumption of lack of consent is absurd, try reversing the genders in your mind for a moment. Don't confuse this mental exercise with arguing that sexual assault rates are equal among the sexes; the purpose is simply to realize that your mind will automatically come up with a very plausible non-rapey interpretation of those words if we can put to one side your misandry (possibly internalized) for a moment. Or you could try imagining it was a gay man talking about another gay man and "they let him" kiss/touch them. Is rape still the first thing that occurs to you?
You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful - I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait
Some encounters DO progress rapidly, without consent forms signed in triplicate, but the thing worth underlining here is Trump isn't giving a blow by blow (he's just tediously bragging.) We have no broader context here; Trump is describing only the alleged moment of truth. If you choose to parse those words to mean that Trump literally walks up to random women in the street that he doesn't know and starts kissing or fingering them before saying a word... you're an idiot. That's not the sort of thing that would pass unnoticed for years. There is obviously some form of a prelude... one that Trump is implying, with head-shaking machismo, is rather short.
What's completly fucking horrifying is that you're excusing this behaviour
I'm not excusing any behavior. I'm merely assuming Trump is describing (in an obnoxious manner) an encounter that progresses fairly rapidly through subtle flirting into kissing or fingering. I've had a few such encounters myself over the years. I wouldn't describe them with the words he used, but neither do I imagine a rapist using the words he used, either. Now, if he'd said "at first they sometimes fight it" or something, THAT would be a pretty big red flag.
But Trump does not describe their reaction... wait no, yes he does. He says "they let him do it". Which fine, in your warped mind could refer to women too terrified to scream out or push him away, but that is not the most obvious interpretation of those words. If you think that should be the default interpretation of those words, there is something seriously damaged with you and your view of male and/or female sexuality.
Once again, this isn't saying he's never committed sexual assault; it's saying that he's never admitted to it on tape.
I was listening. I was also listening to what he was saying in 2008 and before. Were you "listening" just now where I compared his reaction to Snowden with his reaction to Clapper?
If you think it would be "chaos" if we pardoned people who revealed criminal activities, what is the word you would use for looking the other way and neither firing nor imprisoning a person who clearly, knowingly and repeatedly lies to Congress (while under oath) about what our intelligence services are doing?
His reaction to Snowden is not some totally orthogonal issue of justice or stability. The man has clearly changed his mind or betrayed his principles (very possibly in the service of this tired old scheme to get the Republicans to make asses of themselves while the Democrats try to look as boring and vanilla and centrist as possible)... and I argued in another post that 'changing his mind' doesn't seem like a terribly likely option given his other policies.
None of that is relevant when dissecting Trump's own words to determine whether or not he appears to be confessing to a crime. And he did not appear to be.
On a related but separate note, it's completely fucking horrifying that wide swathes of the left have a default assumption of lack of consent when they hear these kinds of things. We saw something similar a couple years back with the "fuck her right in the pussy" meme, as if anything said in an enthusiastic or macho voice automatically implies rape. This infantilization of women and trivialization of rape by pretending to see it everywhere is... not very helpful to women who actually have been sexually assaulted. Quite the opposite, in fact, since the reactionaries have been whipping up a stronger and stronger backlash every times these things are debated.
Hate to tell *you* this buddy, but it's not a crime if they "let you do it", which are the words Trump used in that conversation. Obnoxiously macho and bragging, sure, but he thesis was obviously that women would let him do anything he wanted. You can call that what you will ("pathetically over the top exaggeration"), but it's not bragging about assault.
The right can get away with playing fast and loose with reality. The lesson I would hope that people would take away from this election cycle is that the left doesn't fare nearly as well when they stoop to the same level of deception and/or disorganized thinking. Trump may well have committed a sexual assault or three in his lifetime, but he's yet to admit to it, and every time you try to pretend he has you make your/our cause look that much more pathetically desperate.
Maybe he's seen classified stuff that he's not allowed to tell us, and that's why he changed his mind.
I conceded this to some degree, which is why I said if he wanted to take a nuanced view wherein he can't forgive Snowden's crimes, he could have at least taken steps to address the crimes Snowden revealed (such as Clapper's perjury to Congress.) Furthermore, if this was all some sort of liberal-growing-up thing, he really should have taken steps towards sensible (but by no means absolute) isolationism instead of trying to wave the leftist flag of being such an awesome humanist welcoming in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees whilst simultaneously apparently supporting the mass surveillance state he had railed so hard against. There are tradeoffs here, and if it's actually true that's what he was doing then he absolutely chose the wrong fork in that road. America and its liberal institutions will survive just fine if we restrict immigration from troublesome countries, but the same cannot be said of unchecked mass surveillance.
His decisions in this area, I am sad to say, make the most sense when one assumes he was simply taking the path of least resistance.
You just don't get it, do you?
It's not OK to unilaterally decide to release top-secret information to the public. End of story.
Except (to my knowledge) Manning released zero top secret material. Whatever his/her motivations were, she effectively demonstrated that low level classifications are mainly used to prevent domestic and international outrage, not to counter legitimate security threats.
I happen to think that diplomacy will, in the long run, improve for the better if the ability of diplomats to lie and conceal is significantly disrupted. You are free to disagree, but lying about nature of the material released does not particularly help your cause.
Slashdot Mirror
People like you have only given the Republicans both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the likely ability to appoint an strongly conservative (probably reactionary) SCOTUS that will greatly influence this country for decades to come.
How many Cruz-supporters / Republicans do you know who refer to conservatives as "reactionaries"?
This misunderstanding here is important and illustrative. Your attempt to pigeonhole me and launch into autopilot lecture-me-about-teh-evil-right-wing is the problem right there. That shit did not and is not going to work on actual Trump voters going forward. I know it feels really important and energizing to you, and maybe it does serve a useful political purpose in energizing the base of the party, but among independents and fence-sitters it makes you look weak and unable to engage in the issues that really matter.
Your argument is like that of a petulant child when called out: "s/he made me do it". It's funny how Republican supporters, who talk about personal responsibility now want to deflect responsibility for Trump's election on someone else.
Work on your reading comprehension. I'm not a Trump supporter (and in the post you replied to I clearly said "I don't think people made the right decision this year.") I am an anti-Trump leftist who was arguing on this very site, weeks before the election, that the anti-Trump rhetoric was backfiring disastrously.
For the rest, I can only refer you to my other reply. I know multiple female Obama supporters who voted for Trump. If you think it's more important that you bleat about the KKK and pussy grabbing twenty times a day for the next four years, so be it. Hopefully, others may realize that most people in this country are more concerned about actual policies. (And yes, Trump had some atrocious ones that were completely drowned out by the tsunami of tedious non-sequitur bullshit regarding just how big a racist and sexist he is.)
As for character, what about all the times Trump used the words: "lying Hillary". Was that not a character assassination?
Things that work very well for the right often don't work for the left. It's not fair. Life isn't fair. I'm beyond fairness; I'm trying to get people to care about what can actually work so that the left in this country can be fixed.
Bill and Monica and (particularly) Juanita*, I should have said.
You attempt to explain away the misogyny as just talk. Did you miss the women who came forward to accuse him of actual assault?
Did you miss the part where I said that maybe not every presidential election comes down to a referendum on character? My mother and my sister both voted Trump. They previously voted for Obama. Twice. I can assure you, they don't have an ounce of "internalized misogyny" in their bones. My mother got a flier in the mail (she lives in a swing state) that was primarily bemoaning the fact that Trump once called Rosie O'Donnell a fat pig. She laughed, tossed it in the garbage.
And why shouldn't she? I don't agree with her vote for Trump, not at all, but she and my sister correctly perceived that there wasn't any misogynistic legislation being proposed beyond the abortion stuff which, while rather troubling, wasn't at the tops of their priority lists. This is a simple heuristic method of eliminating the stuff, no matter how dumb or odious it is, that isn't likely to matter in terms of policies Trump officially promotes.
The man could stop kittens to death in his spare time... oh well. If it's a crime, arrest him. If not, we've got much bigger things to worry about. Millions of people have come around to this way of thinking. It wasn't a sudden thing, either. Pretty sure it started in the late 90s with Bill and Monica.
So you admit that Trump made xenophobia a policy position. Basically, you are in denial.
No. Again, this is a heuristic approach. "Ok, he's calling for something that could literally never, ever happen in this country" ==> "ok, so what are they *actually* going to do once someone calms him down and tries to explain the constitution to him?"
Trump isn't half as clever as a lot of people around here seem to think he is, but he managed to at least accidentally stumble into a strategy where the left was provoked into frantically arguing about non-issues. Trump's illegal proposals were non-issues, except to the extent that it proved he was a asshole and a moron, but evidence on those counts was not lacking. Trump's misogyny, such as it was, was even less of an issue for anyone who had already called the personality contest a wash.
He also said it was fine to sexually assault women if you're famous.
Except no, he didn't. He said that women will "let you" kiss them / touch them when you're famous. He was bragging (probably lying), in a cringingly over the top manner, about women being attracted to him "like a magnet" , and yet at least a third of this country refuses to concede this extremely obvious point. Mainstream news outlets like the New York Times are still repeating this astounding fabrication of what he actually said on that tape, and prolific posters here on slashdot will apparently simply add me to their foe list instead of engaging in an intellectually honest discussion of what he was actually saying on the tape.
attacked women for being women
For every "blood coming out of her whatever" (which wasn't even directed at Hillary, was it?), Trump had at least five hundred criticisms that had nothing to do with gender. If you want to argue Trump is a douche you'll get little argument out of me, but I was debating people on slashdot before the election who literally thought that calling Hillary "crooked" was misogynistic. To say it was making a mountain out of a molehill would be a massive understatement. The whinging never stopped. We couldn't ever move *beyond* the misogyny criticism and into actual policy debate. I mean hell, there was even a sustained campaign to paint Bernie supporters as misogynistic, and multiple mainstream media sources (as well as The Onion, tragically) are still clinging to this head-shakingly moronic "glass ceiling still intact!" narrative.
You'd probably not have as many upsets if you looked at the actual arguments and not some superficial appraisal.
Look in the mirror. This election didn't reveal a massive hidden racist element in America. It revealed that the mainstream left is completely incapable of moving beyond the superficial or indeed glancing outside of their safe space echo chamber. I say this as a leftist myself, and someone who was trying in vain to point out to people that the anti-Trump argument was going sideways months ago.
Along with 53% of other white women, my mother and (as I just found out yesterday) my sister voted for Trump. And previously they both voted for Obama. Twice. If the majority of the left writes this off to "internalized misogyny" and changes absolutely nothing about the rhetoric, the midterms will change nothing and Trump will be re-elected in 2020.
Is that what you want to see?
Or maybe the job of president isn't always a referendum on character? I don't think people made the right choice this year, but it's obvious that it was people like you who drove many fence-sitters to the wrong decision... you refused to discuss the actual issues.
"Racism" was not a policy debate in this election. Immigration was.
"Misogyny" wasn't a policy position in this election. Anti-misogyny really wasn't either except among an especially cringy segment of the population (including Clinton and Sanders, sadly) who believe the $0.79 on the dollar "pay gap" can be solved through legislation. (The gap is mostly due to women choosing lower-paying jobs and working fewer hours, which you could argue is a cultural thing we need to change but it's not something you can just legislate away.) There was no proposal to legalize non-consensual pussy-grabbing... or did I miss that Trump speech?
"Xenophobia" wasn't a policy position in this election. Legal and illegal immigration from specific countries were the issues. (Putting aside some shit-talking from Trump about a religious test for entry--which is so obviously unlawful that even a conservative SCOTUS would probably strike it down unanimously.)
But please, do keep up the shaming. People like you have only given the Republicans both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the likely ability to appoint an strongly conservative (probably reactionary) SCOTUS that will greatly influence this country for decades to come. I'm sure that if you can simply call Trump Hilter a hundred times a day, everyone is bound to come to their senses by 2020.
*non-Jewish German civilians. (Though we did turn away quite a few Jews.)
The problem is that people like you wildly conflate policy with sound bites / character assessment. I think the American public got sick of the character assassination stuff in the late 90s. Who the hell cares if he's racist? (I happen to think it's more a matter of him blathering mindlessly, but he could be racist too, sure.) What matters are his policies.
Without agreeing with most of Trump's nonsense on these points, there are obviously rational, non-racist reasons for opposing additional illegal immigration and for restricting legal immigration or extended visas from certain countries (of course not all Muslim-majority countries.) There isn't any country in the world that allows completely unfettered immigration (Svalbard possibly being the closest to an actual open door policy among developed nations, but almost no one takes advantage of this loophole due to the latitude.) Per-country restrictions, particularly for security reasons, have been around forever. If ten thousand Germans civilians, all claiming to be refugees fleeing from Hitler, tried to enter America in 1943... I don't really think we would've let them in, even if the majority were obviously genuine refugees.
There are arguments on the other side of these debates, some of which I'm rather sympathetic to, but your side chose to ignore this in lieu of "OMFG RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST!" Well, sorry, "racism" wasn't an actual, specific policy issue in this election. Immigration was. And people like you largely chose to not debate this issue. For every one genuine and compelling argument from the pro-Hillary side, we saw ten virtue signaling non-sequiturs and this turned a lot of people off.
Ah, sucking electrons from a ground connection... ok, good point, that.
Even if you know that, it is far from obvious that there will be a hardware and software interface that'll let you turn an apparent read-only/write-only device into a read/write device.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that few hardware manufacturers have bothered to create a design where electrical signals can be sent to a speaker/headphone jack, but never received. That sounds like the sort of thing that would require more money to build.
The software interface could/would be provided by the attacker, of course.
I've never heard of any malware doing it before, so I'd say this is pretty clever.
Meh. It's not a new idea at all. I had an electronics kit in the 6th grade that came with a little earpiece that functioned as both a speaker and a microphone. There obviously was only a single diaphragm, and when I read up on how speakers and microphones worked it was readily apparent that they were the same thing (but usually with optimizations for one functionality or the other.)
And so years later when I heard about security concern over webcams, I instantly thought of the speakers as well. There's been talk about this possibility for a long time but there's been nearly as much concern as there has been vs. webcams. Probably because it's tricky, and of limited utility to regular attackers.
One more thing to note though: acoustic analysis can sometimes decode keystrokes on a keyboard fairly accurately. This means that one compromised speaker in a room (perhaps in an IoT device) could be used to compromise the password for a non-compromised device.
I never said I was surprised by the flip flopping. I said it was *unpredictable*. That is, the flip flopping (in general) is predictable, but the specifics have not been. To a large extent he's been doubling down on the shit that has strong boomerang effects when he has no reason to.
He has centrist views on everything.
You're confusing "non-aligned" with "centrist."
It's becoming clear that it's less shrewd and less deliberate than many people (myself included) originally estimated. My opinion of his apparent guile in these matters plummeted after the primary was over. He's not completely clueless, there's a slight method to *some* of the madness but there's no damn reason for him to be doing this on multiple issues at this moment in time. I suppose one could argue he's trying to saturate the media to draw attention away from his cabinet picks or something, but I think that's grasping at straws.
I don't know what to think nor even if it's worth thinking about any more. Governance by RNG. Ignoring for a moment all those shadowy Republican puppet-masters that are a hell of a lot cleverer and more tenacious than Trump... this could actually be an improvement of sorts?
I mean, this is not actually flip-flopping any more. The term is simply not strong enough. What we have here is a flesh and blood expert system running some crude, buggy-as-shit genetic optimizing algorithm... and it's shortly going to be POTUS.
Huh.
Or it could establish an "Eminent Public Domain" program that allows free use of a work of authorship while compensating its author, by estimating a copyright's fair market value and letting the people crowdfund a "taking" pursuant to the Fifth Amendment.
I've always been a fan of this idea, particularly for patents. We're at this big plateau in the first silicon revolution now, just waiting for enough patents to expire and enough factories to be built for the second revolution to kick off.. you know, the one where VERY POWERFUL computers can be had for perhaps $5 (plus the cost of power supply/LCD/etc. if needed), and we see a new boom of incredible CPU-heavy technologies built on the back of this new solution-in-search-of-a-problem. (The AI boom alone should be phenomenal.)
It'll probably take us at least another 15-30 years to reach it on our own (Raspberry Pi is but the tiniest shadow of things to come), but with eminent domain vs. patents plus a few savvy investors willing to build the factories, it could probably happen in just a few years.
Combined with the "I didn't wait bit", and with his apology clearly stating his actions didn't match his words, yes.
Didn't wait for what? A "hello" ? Eye contact? How *precisely* do you imagine this implied scenario going down, this one that he was bragging about and then apologizing to the Republican base about?
I just want to you fully articulate this ridiculous, raging fantasy you obviously have going on up there... this assumption that to "not wait" can only refer to not wait *for any sort of consent or reciprocal speech/action whatsoever* and that his words can only reasonably be parsed to describe an assault. Please, annotate the whole thing if you want. Give us a blow by blow of the subtext, as it appears in your mind.
The apology is irrelevant. Trump has never apologized to or courted SJWs in his life. He was obviously worried about the Mormons and the rest of the evangelicals who genuinely do get into hissy fits when sex is even brought up at all (notice how things went in Utah?), let alone highly crude talk of extramarital sex.
Let me reiterate for the one or two people who may have followed this thread: I very clearly tied this back to your original claim that the "grabbing by the pussy" line was a description of a sexual assault, a claim you doubled and tripled down on.
And now you're running away, because *you* can't stay on topic (the topic being that tape and that sentence and the surrounding context) or answer a very simple question like "what do you think Trump meant?" which (counting this) I've now asked you three times. And your parting shot is to claim that I'm the one engaging in rhetorical tricks and off-topic incoherences.
Just to recap.
You keep repeating the same crap. There's more to sexual assault than having to noisily fight off an attacker.
And an assault is not implied in that tape, in any way shape and form. I'll keep repeating this (well, for one or two more replies, anyway), so long as you keep repeating your fabrications.
Apart from that bit about *not* *waiting* followed by Trump's own apologies stating his actions were NOT the same as his words.
1. Guilt by apology? That damns a lot of people right there, including a lot of rape victims. 2. He was still trying very hard to not lose the evangelical vote. There's no particular reason to suspect he was saying "I didn't really rape anyone" when the Christians were pissed off about the crudeness / fraternization / possible adultery.
And you completely gloss over the fact that "not waiting for any consent whatsoever" is not a reasonable interpretation of those words. Seven years ago, a girl I'd never been with before "didn't wait" to grab my dick. I'm not inclined to brag, but if I were I would probably say something to that effect: "She didn't wait!" If grilled in detail, I might have to clarify: "Ok, she paused for a split second on my inner thigh, at which point I did nothing but indicate my continued interest in the endeavor", thus clarifying that consent was provided, but that doesn't make a terribly good macho bragging story does it? She didn't wait. She grabbed me by the dick. These words do not carry an implication of sexual assault except among some rather hysterical sections of the left who seem largely unaware of the damage their overeagerness is doing to their own cause.
Well this takes the biscuit. You have built up a little fantasy about what you wished he said
He stumbled over a sentence and interrupted himself. You did not answer my question: what do you think he was trying to say? I care about the actual tape and the actual picture he was trying to paint. You appear to care about none of that; you care only about the witch hunt and the broader picture. Well, it turns out the youth of today doesn't really give a shit about your witch hunt mentality. I'm not saying smoking guns don't exist, but they didn't exist HERE.
You are literally making up lies about what I said and then claiming it's my fault.
You very clearly claimed that pussy grabbing is sexual assault. This is absurd. It is not sexual assault any more than "putting a diamond ring in my pocket" (with no further context provided) is grand theft.
There is no way to reason with people so disconnected from reality as you.
My claims have been extremely limited, sensible, and easy to approach if you're being intellectually honest. You're the one insisting that the entire picture be analyzed and judged in one fell swoop and bitching and moaning that I'm interested more in the micro picture of individual lies that led to an entire generation of young people becoming very disillusioned with the whole thing.
This is the other reason the right won.
Numbers show pretty clearly that disillusionment (low turnout), particularly among the youth, was the most decisive factor in this election.
Apart from a weird fantasy about what happened which does not match reality
I am rubber; you are glue? I'm talking about words on a tape and the mis-characterizations of that tape. You're jackknifing all over the damn place.
Trump strongly implied there was consent,
No.
Yes. You want us to interpret the word "let" as "outwardly let, but they didn't really *willingly let* him because they were under coercion", which in the context of Trump's tape is a whole-cloth fabrication. There was no such implication in the tape.
it = the kissing. It's quite clear. And he said quite clearly he did not wait.
Correct. And then people like you added "for consent [be it implicit/explicit/any]" to that sentence, when there is every implication to the contrary.
This isn't my only point here, far from it, but I am curious: do you honestly believe Trump meant to say "I've always been automatically attracted to beautiful women" (a rather hollow sentence, even by his standards)... or, given the over the top bragging context of the conversation, was he trying to say "beautiful women have always been automatically attracted to me"? And if you admit that he meant to say the latter, I'm very curious about where you think you can sense this implication from Trump that the women weren't into it.
The only reason to not give a toss if if you want to use those positions of power yourself. I mean if you never mention that you're abusing such a position it's a-OK according to you. Pro tip: it isn't.
Non-sequitur nonsense. I care about leftists lying about the contents of this specific tape as a compelling example of the sort of misfires that led to Trump's election. If there's evidence elsewhere that he abused his power then he abused his power. That doesn't excuse bullshit like this, where you blatantly lie about the contents of a tape. The alt-right feeds and grows on this very thing, this whinging leftist PC masochism that cheapens and weakens terms like "rape", "misogyny" and "racism" whilst actual victims (very possibly even including victims of Trump) slip under the radar.
IOW you can't be bothered to know what's going on so you simply invent shit
I've invented nothing. I've merely responded to the soundbite that people like you are responsible for inventing and pushing, after the man gave you a mountain of legitimate and very powerful ammunition to use against him.
Hm let me see. If some woman came up to me and started kissing me without my consent, yeah, I'd be pretty fucking pissed off.
Trump strongly implied there was consent, whilst giving no implication whatsoever there was a lack of consent.
Doubly so if they did it from a position of power.
Did Trump say anything implying that he was leveraging a position of power?
Don't mix up your sex scandals. I'm talking about the tape and the tape alone, because it was (as I argued weeks before the election) an embarrassingly cringy moment when I realized the left was ignoring the mountain of ammunition they had in favor of lying about what Trump had said, a lie that took me 30 seconds on Google to uncover.
Yeah you are, you're inventing reasons why it's OK.
No, I'm pointing out that you people are, at best, deeply confused about the "it" in that sentence. There's no implication whatsoever that the "it" was a woman being coerced in any way.
So it's misandry to not want to have women physically push themselves on me against my will?
You're doing it again. What appeal does the left have... left if you all resort to this sort of "Saddam had WMDs" level of fabrications? There is no implication whatsoever, in Trump's words, that the women were unwilling. His entire implicit macho thesis was some sort of animal magnetism bullshit.
He was trying to say (although he flubbed the words as usual) that beautiful women have always been attracted to him. You even quoted that bit to me. For fuck's sake, can't you see how sad it is that you want to make people believe he was bragging about raping women, instead of the infinitely more obvious ego-pumping interpretation that he was claiming that women were crazy attracted to him?
Pretty clear then that EVERYONE except apologists knew what those words meant. Those words mean sexual assault.
No, they don't. I can recall girls who have "not waited" to kiss me. It wasn't sexual assault, because there was strong implicit consent given (even if it was subtle) and also I made no attempt to avoid or disengage. Once time, I was "grabbed by the dick" (through my pants) literally less than thirty seconds after flirting began (...by a friend, not a sex worker, just to clarify.) Implied consent was most certainly given. I would characterize this encounter, wait for it... as one wherein the female involved did not wait.
"Not wait"..."they let you do it", among normal people without severe personality or sexual disorders, means to not draw things out with a ton of flirting. It does not mean to walk up to random strangers on the street and start doing things out of the blue with zero words or body language exchanged.
My view of sexuality is that it is not OK to use a position of power to sexually assault people. If you disagree, then frankly it is you who is deeply broken, not me.
I don't give a toss about positions of power, because Trump did not reference his position of power once in that tape. If you want to talk about him supposedly sneaking in and looking at naked women in his beauty pageants then yeah, that's fucked up and possibly a crime, but that's not the topic at hand.
I care about the tolerance and propagation of lies and self-destructive hysteria on the left much more than I care about the analysis of the character of Donald J. Trump. If you're trying to trick me into saying he's an asshole or a moron then let me just save you the trouble: he's an asshole and a moron. I am concerned with the fact that the left is trying to beat the right at their own game and doing irreversible damage in the process.
Except no it isn't. Otherwise why would he have to come out and say that he didn't actually do what he claimed to do?
Again, I cannot be bothered to follow these
You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful - I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait
Some encounters DO progress rapidly, without consent forms signed in triplicate, but the thing worth underlining here is Trump isn't giving a blow by blow (he's just tediously bragging.) We have no broader context here; Trump is describing only the alleged moment of truth. If you choose to parse those words to mean that Trump literally walks up to random women in the street that he doesn't know and starts kissing or fingering them before saying a word... you're an idiot. That's not the sort of thing that would pass unnoticed for years. There is obviously some form of a prelude... one that Trump is implying, with head-shaking machismo, is rather short.
What's completly fucking horrifying is that you're excusing this behaviour
I'm not excusing any behavior. I'm merely assuming Trump is describing (in an obnoxious manner) an encounter that progresses fairly rapidly through subtle flirting into kissing or fingering. I've had a few such encounters myself over the years. I wouldn't describe them with the words he used, but neither do I imagine a rapist using the words he used, either. Now, if he'd said "at first they sometimes fight it" or something, THAT would be a pretty big red flag.
But Trump does not describe their reaction... wait no, yes he does. He says "they let him do it". Which fine, in your warped mind could refer to women too terrified to scream out or push him away, but that is not the most obvious interpretation of those words. If you think that should be the default interpretation of those words, there is something seriously damaged with you and your view of male and/or female sexuality.
Once again, this isn't saying he's never committed sexual assault; it's saying that he's never admitted to it on tape.
I was listening. I was also listening to what he was saying in 2008 and before. Were you "listening" just now where I compared his reaction to Snowden with his reaction to Clapper?
If you think it would be "chaos" if we pardoned people who revealed criminal activities, what is the word you would use for looking the other way and neither firing nor imprisoning a person who clearly, knowingly and repeatedly lies to Congress (while under oath) about what our intelligence services are doing?
His reaction to Snowden is not some totally orthogonal issue of justice or stability. The man has clearly changed his mind or betrayed his principles (very possibly in the service of this tired old scheme to get the Republicans to make asses of themselves while the Democrats try to look as boring and vanilla and centrist as possible)... and I argued in another post that 'changing his mind' doesn't seem like a terribly likely option given his other policies.
None of that is relevant when dissecting Trump's own words to determine whether or not he appears to be confessing to a crime. And he did not appear to be.
On a related but separate note, it's completely fucking horrifying that wide swathes of the left have a default assumption of lack of consent when they hear these kinds of things. We saw something similar a couple years back with the "fuck her right in the pussy" meme, as if anything said in an enthusiastic or macho voice automatically implies rape. This infantilization of women and trivialization of rape by pretending to see it everywhere is... not very helpful to women who actually have been sexually assaulted. Quite the opposite, in fact, since the reactionaries have been whipping up a stronger and stronger backlash every times these things are debated.
Hate to tell *you* this buddy, but it's not a crime if they "let you do it", which are the words Trump used in that conversation. Obnoxiously macho and bragging, sure, but he thesis was obviously that women would let him do anything he wanted. You can call that what you will ("pathetically over the top exaggeration"), but it's not bragging about assault.
The right can get away with playing fast and loose with reality. The lesson I would hope that people would take away from this election cycle is that the left doesn't fare nearly as well when they stoop to the same level of deception and/or disorganized thinking. Trump may well have committed a sexual assault or three in his lifetime, but he's yet to admit to it, and every time you try to pretend he has you make your/our cause look that much more pathetically desperate.
Maybe he's seen classified stuff that he's not allowed to tell us, and that's why he changed his mind.
I conceded this to some degree, which is why I said if he wanted to take a nuanced view wherein he can't forgive Snowden's crimes, he could have at least taken steps to address the crimes Snowden revealed (such as Clapper's perjury to Congress.) Furthermore, if this was all some sort of liberal-growing-up thing, he really should have taken steps towards sensible (but by no means absolute) isolationism instead of trying to wave the leftist flag of being such an awesome humanist welcoming in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees whilst simultaneously apparently supporting the mass surveillance state he had railed so hard against. There are tradeoffs here, and if it's actually true that's what he was doing then he absolutely chose the wrong fork in that road. America and its liberal institutions will survive just fine if we restrict immigration from troublesome countries, but the same cannot be said of unchecked mass surveillance.
His decisions in this area, I am sad to say, make the most sense when one assumes he was simply taking the path of least resistance.
You just don't get it, do you? It's not OK to unilaterally decide to release top-secret information to the public. End of story.
Except (to my knowledge) Manning released zero top secret material. Whatever his/her motivations were, she effectively demonstrated that low level classifications are mainly used to prevent domestic and international outrage, not to counter legitimate security threats.
I happen to think that diplomacy will, in the long run, improve for the better if the ability of diplomats to lie and conceal is significantly disrupted. You are free to disagree, but lying about nature of the material released does not particularly help your cause.